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That must mean that there should be a nice niche market for people who either like to travel REALLY fast in the lower- to mid- troposphere or go on nice, leisurely rides in the upper troposphere/ lower stratosphere.

Usually, before attempting an homemade balloon take-off you ask a couple of permissions to the flight control authority of your country (in Italy it's the ENAC) just to make sure something like that does not happen. There is usually also an altimeter used to cut off the balloon before 60000 feet in order to use the GPS to recover the payload.

Awesome vid. I think people should be required to watch something like that every day that reinforces the realization that we exist in a thin haze of gas surrounding a ball of rock that's lost in a massive emptiness. It really puts things in perspective.

This actually is annoying to many people, because a popular science project is to tie a camera to a weather balloon and send it up to ~100k ft. You can get beautiful pictures of the earth's curvature from the edges of the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, if your GPS chip (which allows you to locate the camera after it falls back to earth) locks because it went above 60k ft, you're SOL when you try to find your camera.

So, it is very important for some people that both the altitude and speed conditions are met.

EDIT: Since I'm getting a lot of comments on this, an instructional site:

Back in the mid 90s I remember a protest against ITAR's encryption regulations. There was a website with a form that sent a little 3-line Perl encryption program to Anguilla, officially making you an arms smuggler.

Ummm...If someone's going to go through the trouble of building an actual, functional missile, I think they're going to want to use something better than a 300 dollar GPS from Wal-Mart to steer the thing.

I assume that's the story about the sr-71, without opening it. Keep in mind that that jet is to date the fastest ever built, with the possible exception of the x-15... I say possible because I think the x-15 may technically be rocket propelled.

I had a wonderful time on a plane trip one time using the gps/magnetometer/accelerometer on my phone. The pilot set one of the planes radio channels(where you can plug headphones into your armrest and select different stations) to be able to listen to the radio chatter the pilots were hearing so we could hear the bullshit that was keeping us from taking off (I've heard this may actually be common).

After learning the name of our jet I was able to listen to what our pilots were being told to do and could watch on my phone as they did it. I could see the pitch and roll change as we were asked to change altitude or our heading and my favorite was watching the speed change as we were asked to go from I believe it was mach .5 to mach .7 and actually being able to see what that meant.

No actually we were sitting on the plane for over an hour and the pilot kept coming over the loudspeaker telling us why we had to keep waiting and was bitching about how DCA opted not to spend money on improving their air traffic control when they had the chance. After about an hour of us sitting on the runway he told us that we could listen to the radio chatter via channel 7.

I don't fly often so I literally listened to it for the entire 4 hour flight and loved every minute of it. Afterwards I would tell people about the experience and heard many people say that they thought all planes broadcasted radio chatter to passengers but others had no idea.

As far as I know, the only people who do this are United ("From the Flightdeck" feature which is normally channel 9). It seems to be somewhat random whether they turn it on, but seems to be on for the majority of flights.

It has nothing to do with the satellites, and everything to do with your receiver hardware+software. Source: I write GPS receiver firmware.

Edit: this guy is sort of correct, in that they are providing a spec for future generations of GPS satellites for the minimum power received by receivers in a particular part of space. They aren't like, transmitting power directly away from the earth or anything, they are just putting a little extra power into the sidelobes if I interpret it correctly. See XNormal's comment below.

It's a resistive touch screen thing. He's using the pad of his finger, which makes sense on a capacitive screen, but not on a resistive. If you spend more time using resisitive you're more likely to use your fingernail/fingertip, but since everyone is used to using capacitive on their smartphone, the results can be frustrating.

It comes down to the fact that you're actually squishing two pieces of plastic together, which takes force rather than the mere presence of a finger. It's why older touch screens tended to be used with hard styluses rather than just fingers.

My dad had the N900 (before upgrading to an HTC android) and while I think that phone is spectacular, the screen sucked there too. Try and swipe through an album of pictures on your iPod and on the N900 - can you really say the N900 is superior?

However, the stylus made everything better and made the screen much more usable.

It's probably "triangulating" to the actual ground elevation. Being so much higher means you have to go faster to travel the same about of ground distance (v=r*theta). Not sure that would make a big difference though since theta is equal and air r is very close to ground r. Ok ignore everything I just said. Not sure why it's so low.

Exactly. A pilot came into one of my classes and explained that while signals from cell phones and the like don't actually interfere with the flying of the plane, there's too many types for the FAA to check them all.

The problem with that explanation is they haven't found a single device that actually does interfere with communication on the plane. It'd make more sense if they could point to some device and say, "HEY LOOK! This is what could happen." But they can't.

It's like me saying eating certain kinds of chocolate might turn you into a werewolf, so you shouldn't eat chocolate. Rather than pointing to a single incident of it happening, all I'm saying is that it isn't impossible that some chocolate out there that may or may not exist might turn you into a werewolf.

I always love analogies that do not actually help the argument, but more as just ways to say the first thing on the top of your mind. I can only guess of why you tied together chocolate and werewolves.

I think that having electronics turned off is not as absurd as your analogy is implying. Its a simple precaution, and I am willing to obey then try to explain to the guy next to me who is screaming "YOU ARE GOING TO DOOM US ALL WITH THAT DEATH MACHINE!!!!" that it is harmless.

as a corporate pilot I only ask people to turn things off on days with bad weather.... incidentally on sunny days as we approach cities (and peoples phones start reconnecting) my navigation equipment and often my radio altimeter goes mental (if it were bad weather one would pucker very badly at this kind of event). So no, it can have an effect and could potentially kill you. just turn it off....ಠ_ಠ

Are we forgetting the far more obvious concern about EMF interference? That rule is just made very broad so that flight attendants don't need electrical engineering degrees to identify the walkman from the ham radio. You know this though right? Right?

Get a fix while you are still on the ground. Turn it on as soon as you can after getting airborne (or keep on through the take off if you are brave... I do someimes..)

And also hold it up to the glass/plastic window. There is too much metal inside most planes for it to get the first "fix". After that it may be ok..

Use the satellite info screen to see how well you're doing. You need 3 or 4 good satellite signals or you will never get a fix. Keep in mind, Some GPS units just cant get a fix while moving that fast (especially if you have moved a long distance from where it had it's last fix), or while inside a big metal tube.

I'm speaking from experience .. I have family in the airline industry and fly a lot. Looking at google earth and identifying what you see on the ground is pretty fun..

My first thought as well. The procrastinator in me kept me from posting it while I read comments and chuckled. Now I'm typing out this long comment about how I was going to post the same thing which is waaayyy longer than the post itself.

I did this with a laptop based unit in the late 90s, after we were cruising and laptops could be used. Buddy had to hold antenna near window, which got the attention of the attendant. I was told to turn it off since 'transmitting devices' are never allowed. : (. I was more sad they didn't understand the difference between transmitting and just receiving. Before I turned it off, it was accurately clocking the plane.

Youngins... when I was 8, my dad had a Garmin GPS III (which still works, iirc), which he used throughout our airplane trip to Hong Kong and back. Back in the early days of portable GPS units, they were used for locating where you were and tracking your journey, and not for step-by-step navigation.

He has quite the collection of "waypoints" set at various locations he's visited: Angels' Landing in Zion National Park, Bright Angel Point and various spots along the North Kaibab trail in the Grand Canyon, Denali National Park in Alaska, and various others.

I tried that with the GPS in my phone. I waited for 15 minutes or so, but it never locked on to more than 1 satellite. It found over 20 right after I exited the airport, with Airplane Mode still turned on and WiFi off.